The end?

It's seems all that's left of Scraps is scraps. There's not much more. Enjoy what you find here but don't hold your breath.

Poems written at midnight always seem to be the most sincere.  Even if they aren't the most refined.  Here's an example.


Angels in the Sand


Shadow walks.
Shallow walks.
Deepness walking by.
Shallow prints of deeper things,
opposite the sky.
Prints from walks.
Prints from talks.
Remembered days gone by.
Little footprints in the dust
compliment the sky.
Be not silent
burning star. 
Your light ignites my sky.
My everything; my only one.
Your footprints next to mine.
A story young.
But to grow old; 
your footprints next to mine.
I'll walk eternity with you 
and, with you, touch the sky.

Evening

Words are a wonderful thing.  Some words are more than one at the same time.  Some times need more than one word.  


Evening

Evening rolls in, evening out the cloud-wrinkled colors left by a past breaking dawn;

The end of a broken day.  

--Painted high, with ivory and gold, a day breaks every day  

But breaks as into song; not shattered pieces to mourn.

Evening rolls in; not breaking.  Relieving the fingers of day.  

Releasing its dutiful grasp on the sky.

And the stars seem to jingle like so many bells; 

Dusty bells on deep blankets of untroubled night.

Brooms of dark trees sweep stardust from the sky

As the moon stirs a spoonful of midnight on the horizon.

Here I looked for His tender mercies: In the comets; the tears of the stars.

Oh! The lenses and the light! Must silence be so dark a word?  

Here I began to see the iron path.

Here I came to believe in angels.  

A Life for a Life

This is a short story I did for an assignment some time ago.  I struggled.  Sorting through possibilities is can be difficult when there are so many.  The idea behind the title had a few facets: Lives change.  The characters', few though they may be, the rest of the world's lives, the earth itself would lose its life to the colony.  Some of that never came through as strongly as I'd liked, but there's always time to revise.  Here it is though. Enjoy.

A Life for a Life

It was originally just a test of new building technologies being developed for a Mars colony, but it just kept getting bigger and bigger.  The Mercury colony was enormous.  Building it in space meant it didn’t have to support any weight, not even its own, during construction.  There was no limit to its size.  And man likes a challenge.  The whole world seemed to be consumed by it: building.  It all seemed like a dream.  Then, when it became visible to the naked eye from Earth’s surface, the dream cracked and reality was left; an exact duplicate of what the dream had been.  That began to change opinions.  Groups of anti-Mercurians arose; protests, demonstrations, riots.  “Because we can,” wasn’t a good enough reason to build anymore.  None of them could make it to space to cause actual harm to the station, but people at home started checking their locks.  

For people like Charlotte Wolfe, that was all too personal.  Her husband, Spencer, had been promoted from research engineer directly to project manager at the Mercury colony.  After he had solved the issues with the planet-core tech, a great deal was expected of him.  Charlotte was left with two small children and an otherwise empty house with nothing to look forward to but a weekly video chat with Spencer, thousands of miles away.  On his first trip to the colony, Charlotte ignored her misgivings at the launch pad.  She gave Spencer a goodbye kiss and hid the biting icy part of her mixed feelings from her children who didn’t understand what that monstrous obelisk was that their daddy was walking into.  Survey and design were only scheduled for a month.  

“What’s taking so long?” asked Charlotte.

“We’ve run into a few snags, that’s all,” replied Spencer.

“What kind of snags turn a month into four?”

“It’s just...plans keep changing.  They’ve decided to see if they can keep building until it has gravity -- natural gravity, and can support atmosphere.  There’s a lot more potential for the tech than we realized.”

“Gravity?  There’s a lot of potential for your family too.  The longer you’re gone the more we risk losing it.  Do you know when you’re coming home yet?”

“Soon.  I hope.  It’s over my head Charlotte; I’m not really the one making decisions.”

“Well, tell whoever is they’d better get on it.”  She grinned.

“I know Hon, I miss you too.  Tell the kids I love them.  I’ll try and relay your message, but I’m not sure how well it will go over.”  He chuckled.  

Charlotte was at the pad eight months later when Spencer finally came home.  

On it went; building and building, pro-building, protesting, living life normally but with the knowledge that normal was going to include a new planet.

There were rumors that engines and weapons were being built into the very structure of that new planet -- a traveling world that could either protect or destroy.  One could never tell with rumors.

By Spencer’s third trip, Charlotte didn’t even look out the window as the shuttle launched.  She couldn’t.  She hated the colony.  She wasn’t really anti-Mercurian -- she couldn’t care less about politics.  She hated it for the simple fact that it took her husband away.  

Eventually it seemed that there were two moons in the sky.  Problems with tides and magnetic fields were already cropping up, all promptly squelched by the world building force; but the bigger problems still seemed far distant.  Earth was still home.  

Still, the only people on the station were scientists and engineers.  Calculating, designing, researching, recalculating; everything had to be done on the largest scale anyone could imagine.  It’s remarkable how small the details of that scale are.  A planet was being created.  Orbits had to be mapped; the gravity of the Earth, the moon, the sun, and the other planets would all be affected.  You couldn’t just plop a new planet right in the middle of it all and expect luck to work things out.  Every factor had to be accounted for.  Atmosphere had to be carefully formulated.  Some of it could be manufactured, but most of it would have to come from what was already available.  It would be filtered and enriched and transported to the Mercury colony leaving the Earth with nothing.  The operation would be colossal: as atmosphere moved life would have to follow but enough had to be left on Earth to support the plants, animals, and people that would be waiting for the next transport.  All other needed materials would be moved the same way; filtered and separated, transferred by degrees.  A veritable Garden of Eden would be created, a hellish waste left.  It would have to be done in carefully planned stages.  Noah’s arc across orbits, and the flood would be everything, and it would be disappearing not growing.  

Construction reached a critical point; the colony almost had enough gravity for civilians to start migrating.  One morning, Spencer Wolfe looked out at the Earth-rise over the colony horizon.  It still felt like a dream.  Opportunity, hope, loneliness; the colony was many things to him.  Home was not one of them.  He rolled the lucky red lego his son had sent him in his hand and sighed.

“Earth to Spencer, we need you over here,” yelled a worker.  “Or should I say colony to Spencer?”  Spencer jumped and almost lost his grip on the lego. 

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I’ve been calling you for five minutes,” said the worker.  “What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m sorry.  You know, I thought my mind was playing tricks on me just now.  I could have sworn your voice was coming from Earth,” Spencer replied.

“Wow Spence, I think you’ve been wearing that helmet a little too long.”

“Yeah, maybe so.  What did you need?”

“The transport with the core-components just got here.  We need your okay on install.”

“Alright.  Lets go.”

Time was growing short for the Earth.  Spencer felt a twinge of regret as they bounded off to the transport dock.  He’d miss the rest of the Earth-rise.  There would only be so many more of those before it was just a woeful rock.

The Mercurians, had adopted a new system of days and hours and even years to match the growing size of their planet.  Sooner or later everyone would have to get used to that; different years.  Even Charlotte.  The strangest part was that the scale would keep changing as long as the planet kept growing.  It almost seemed like it could grow now, instead of just being built.  Then one morning, Mercury colony time, the whole Earth was suddenly flooded with a single data feed.  Every broadcast on the planet was commandeered to show a video of one single action with one single sound, only a few seconds long.   A helmeted figure, so used to life in space where Newton’s laws are on hold, let go of a small red block -- and it dropped.

To A Soldier

Once upon a time, there was a man.  As tall as any man.  The man that can't be moved.  He stood with flag in hand. And the flag waved all the more in contrast with his stillness.  And still he stands, as tall as any man.  The man that can't be moved.  For what life should have been.  What it could have been; could be.  And standing, tall as any man, on a world that's left his feet he can't be moved from what he is.  A beacon.  The man that can't be moved.


Three cheers for the men who can't be moved.  Who will be what they need to be, especially when it's impossible.  Because they know why they need to be.

To A Soldier

All they push you to is winning

And when you do, they make you feel ashamed

I pity you mighty soul

Being made a monster is uncomfortable

Growing

A poem I wrote for a creative writing class a little while ago.  This was my favorite summer as a child; the one just before I started kindergarten.  It's a happy odd feeling to look at the first time I got the wind knocked out of me with fondness.  

Growing

Mother taught more than the flowers to grow that summer

Now, walking beside the beaten path, I wish to help them live

Feeling a grin, I remember when I learned that missing the mark 

Leads to a dirty face and futile breaths

I can almost feel the porch railing in my stomach again

It’s funny now

Mother lifted my head and planted my feet

I learned to make things grow that summer

Walking beside the beaten path I see the flowers remember their lessons

They’re still growing

Is It Too Confusing?

When you remove the rails, straight lines fade from the vocabulary of trains.  I just posted something like this, but this one's different. Or not.  

Confusion is commonly found where I stand.

Chasing the rainstorm, wishing it would blow my way, 

Whispering a quiet huzzah in my heart,

Living on the verge of tears.

Sydney’s crayons,

Macaroni and grasshoppers,

Piecemeal poems, 

Volumes said to the wind.

Useless usefulness.

Someone else can stir the pond; it’s clearer when it settles anyway.

The music in my words is twelve tone.  

Abnormal rhythms and irregular rhymes, anthemic operas of dissonant dreams.

There’s no proving a thought to an unused mind.

What about a harbor keeps a ship afloat?

Frozen echoes of dances passed?

You’re yelling in my heart.

Like falling down stairs.

Sunflowers

True stories aren't always the most sad ones.  Sometimes it's hard to tell though.

Sunflowers

My sunflowers are gone.  

Somebody thought they were in the way and pulled them.  

You just can’t cry at sunflowers so what do you do instead?  

So here we stand at the end of all things, once again at the brink.

Walking alone with the rest of them.

Laundry Fight

Anthropomorphize.  Interesting word.  Interesting result when stirred into the soup of mundaneity .  Again, entertaining.

Doing laundry, I noticed the sleeve of a shirt was wrapped around a pair of shorts.  The phrase “strangle hold” immediately came to mind.  A battle of laundry swiftly ensued as the socks pounced on the jeans.  The baseball shirts all fought as a team as if everything else were the umps.  The board shorts retained their non partizan chill until rib knits began throwing things.  The static ballistics all crackled and screamed as I tried to break up the fight.  And in a moment I realized I was nuts thinking my clothes could have fights.

Truly Scraps

So, I keep track of bits and pieces of things that cross my mind through the days.  Sometimes it's entertaining to put them together, even if they don't make all that much sense.  Welcome to a train of thought.  My trains don't need tracks.

Truly Scraps:

Do you ever catch yourself becoming convinced of your imagination?

Pouring homophones through gramophones and ringing tones and grinding stones beneath our bones. 

It doesn’t make the right sense when the pieces aren’t all right.

But you’ll be alright in the end.

Comets are the tears of the stars.

Funny how tears go down and tempers go up.  

There’s plenty of water under the bridge.  

Plenty of fire in the sky.

A glance at the trees might remind the travelers how small they are.

Seeing the iron path,

The cold rush of blood sets my bones on fire;

Or the days that passed with colors ripping past the borders of all thought.

What somethings speak with subtle voice when hearts are left alone to chase the fleeting years?

The memories of life that barred the dark of nightmares past; prayers that fractured fear.

Listen to the crack of my weak-side ankle jabbing at the walls of the museum.  

It reminds me of the echoic crack in my heart: because I’m there alone.

The joy of discovery isn’t bound by the laws of reality.

How do you stop the pendulum swing?

It’s like watching a cheese grater do math.

Watching butterfly dreams; sitting on a tennis ball imagining it’s the world.

This morning I felt warm and saw snow.

It’s difficult to write on small pages.